Girardi has covered this ground before, though never so explicitly. The haunting "Madeleine's Ghost" contrasts the empty existence of rootless New Yorkers with the grace of those living in history-rich New Orleans, where the past is cherished. And his less successful -- and less spectral -- "The Pirate's Daughter" decries our moral bankruptcy.

When we first meet hero Jack Squire, he is having his cat put to sleep, much to the disgust of the vet's assistant, the reader and, ultimately, to Jack himself. "You're really despicable," the assistant tells him. "You're murdering your cat because she's an inconvenience." It's not, of course, as simple as that. The cat belonged to Jack's mother, who died when he was 12 and to whose loss he has never really been reconciled. The death of her cat is Jack's first realization that all is not right with his life.

A successful trader in international currencies, Jack wears a "market watch" that alerts him whenever something happens in the world that might affect the exchange rates: earthquakes, assassinations, floods. "Civil war in Liberia," it tells him. "Thousands killed, heavy fighting, Monrovia." He thinks: "Bad news for any fool trading in Liberian dollars."

He is engaged to a woman in perfect physical shape, who has all the right accoutrements, is thought to be a "good catch" and is allergic to cats -- so she couldn't take care of Jack's while he is in Venice on business for a few months. Jack believes that he has succeeded in business to spite his poor, rigid and disapproving father, and despite his liberal education, "by exercising those very qualities the humanities deplored -- namely, ruthlessness, self-interest, and a single-minded devotion to material gain." Venice -- and the beautiful, enigmatic woman he meets there -- is about to change all that. From the first, he finds the beauty of the city unsettling, cannot sleep, is hardly himself.

On one of his midnight rambles he meets Caterina Bendramin on one of her errands of mercy, feeding the city's homeless cats. She is very pale, dresses in old-fashioned clothes, never comes out in the daytime and won't tell Jack where she lives -- or much of anything else about herself. His market watch, she says "is a demon," and he should throw it away. "The hours of your life," she tells him, "are slipping away, they are wasted in the chase after money and more money."

Her name, he soon learns, belonged to a family of early aristocrats, now supposed to be extinct. Her mother, sisters and brother are all dead, she says. "They all died in the plague." For "a chilling moment" Jack thinks she is serious, until he sees the "odd little smile playing around the corners of her mouth." She and her friends, she tells him, are "Barnabotti," poor aristocrats who were charged with taking care of the city and who have not existed since the 18th century. "Of course it is some sort of joke," a friend says.

Surprisingly, the ghost story and the morality tale don't clash but fit together nicely. Where Girardi goes astray is in his occasionally purple passages and obvious, over-the-top effects: Making love to Caterina, Jack finds her "cold as stone" and thinks "for a quick, strange moment of grave markers and tombs." But Girardi succeeds in making our modern, soulless world seem far more frightening than whatever specters might haunt us from the past.